


Dreaming the World's End

by tsukara (AndThenTheresAnne)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Cross-Posted on A Teaspoon and an Open Mind, F/M, Gallifrey, archiving old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-14
Updated: 2008-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:22:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24103561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThenTheresAnne/pseuds/tsukara
Summary: The Doctor dreams of orange skies and silver leaves. So does Rose. Inspired by Prompt #1 for the 2nd doctor_rose_las round.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Kudos: 4





	Dreaming the World's End

He dreams of skies, painted in their blood-orange light, the suns mostly set, turning the deep red grass purple. These are skies he knows, so well, staring at them as he did, for years and years and years, wanting to get away so badly, wanting to touch those stars. Running towards that sky painted in silks and satin clouds, crossed by the white lines of bones of buildings. He knows this sky very well, and pretends that he does not.

It's only a dream–nightmare, his mind tells him; he ignores–but as he lies there on the hillside, outside the dome, on the long, scratchy, perfumed grass, red shading down to purple, he can't help but wonder if he ever really felt this content anytime he lived on Gallifrey except in his memories. He had never stopped and taken the time to be content, to simply lie under the Jaumelia trees, since he was eight years old. So much running–away, towards, from, all under that impossible sky, heading for a future that he could not have known the nature of back when he was young and innocent.

He hadn't been innocent in so long that he wondered what it was like, to be that way again. That was how he'd found himself dreaming under the Jaumelia trees of his old, empty planet, silent but for the wind. The seconds before the cataclysm that should claim the place delayed and stretched into minutes and hours, in that way that dreams have.

Rose plops down next to him, the grass crunching realistically under her. She sits there and is as silent as the rest of the world for a moment, taking it in. He's dreamed of Gallifrey before with her here. Scattered images and broken fragments--the nightmares of a man not yet put together again. After that there had been happier dreams, mostly other adventures or the quiet moments that hadn't been long enough the first time spun out into idylls of a life not quite their own.

She sighs into the wind. "I shouldn't have to tell you again."

But she does and she will, and he loves her for it, though it hurts each and every time.

"It wasn't your fault."

He accepts the lie she keeps telling him faithfully. But he blames himself and she knows it. A hundred thousand wars across time and space and the one he couldn't stop, not when it mattered the most. A hundred thousand moments of peace, lying here in the grass, under dancing leaves in the silence of the dying day that he squandered because he was too busy running, running, running.

"They're like little tin soldiers, Rose, that I keep sending off to die."

She leans back on her elbows, staring at the swirls of leaves and clouds above her head as a gust of wind blows past the hillside. "No one's died yet, Doctor."

Night falls and the hilltop gets colder, but neither shivers or is uncomfortable. The cold is a mere fact, and the dreaming cannot make them shiver in their separate beds, universes apart. "But they will," he replies, just as the first blooms of light appear on the horizon.

It goes much more slowly than it really did, the spreading fire mimicking the dawn of that orange sky. "It may look false," she remarks as if reading his mind–maybe she is, because she's simply an imagined part of his own mind–standing slowly. "But there's hope in there if you look hard enough."

He wants to take her by the arms, demand to know what she meant by that, whether it means a thing. Most of all he wants to know how she can say it with hope when he feels as if he has none. He settles for asking a different question that's been plaguing him in these dreams lately. "What is this, Rose?"

She looks down at him, the angles of her face cut sharply in the dark, and eyes just barely shining by the glimmer of the early dawn. "It's a dream," she answers simply.

The Doctor stands, walks a few steps away, putting his hands over his face. "Whose dream?" He asks, not expecting an answer.

When he turns back to her, she's looking at him oddly. "You haven't figured it out yet?"

*

It had started a few months after she'd arrived on the TARDIS. Rose Tyler almost never remembered her dreams beyond jumbled impressions like 'there was this one bloke, and something about cats with dreadlocks'. After spending whole days with the Doctor it didn't surprise her that she'd sometimes remember him showing up in her dreams. It was just little, fragmented notions of him, big-eared and leather-clad, made even more uncertain by her fuzzy recollections upon waking.

It wasn't until one night she dreamed and had woken up with a distinct phrase rattling around in her head that she realized that the dreams had been getting progressively clearer and crisper, as if someone was slowly adjusting the rabbit ears on an old television in her brain.

But the signal was scrambled, images and feelings garbled by fear and the constant running away. It wasn't every night either, just every now and then, more often after something big and scary happened. The one thing she could tell was that the Doctor was in the dreams. Beyond that, all was chaos.

For weeks after he regenerated she'd dreamed of gold and dust and time. This time, when she began to dream of her Doctor again, the images were less scrambled, more ordered. She was always watching from just behind him as he dreamed, or remembered, perhaps, a hundred alien skies. And then one night she'd spoken to him, and he'd treated her like a part of the dream world, reacted exactly how he would in the waking world.

And they'd spoken of everything and nothing. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax and she wondered what this was. She'd said something to him over her mug one morning that earned an odd look from him. Almost as if he'd heard her say it before, very recently; as if in a dream.

She thought then that she'd figured it out; that somehow their dreams were getting tangled up together. She assumed that he figured it out after her comment. But they acted as if nothing had changed, and that the shared dreaming was something routine and completely normal.

There had been happy dreams, and dreams of old defeats and new worlds she hadn't seen yet. They never talked about it, a little secret they kept close to themselves, even when they got closer with each other.

Rose could feel the difference in her dreams now, when she had them. They were rare, more rare then she'd like, and sometimes they were only jumbled images and the same fear-running that she'd seen before. Other times there were times of peace, little respites from a world that wasn't hers, and from the hole in the bottom of his hearts.

They would talk of joy and sorrow and the way they tended to mix so frequently. The Doctor told her of worlds visited and his current life and marveled sometimes that she would keep coming to see him, trapped as she was, always that sadness in his voice.

There was one place he kept returning to, gold skies and red fields and silence under the falling stars and leaves, sometimes to fight, to rage, to weep against the consuming fire and dark. Other times he would lie here in the silence and wait for the end of the world. She had watched it burn so many times now, so many times.

And it still hurt every time.

Rose asked him the name, and he told her: Gallifrey, the shining world; told her about the trees and the mourning flowers and the grass; pointed out the glass dome, cracks hidden in the failing light, the bone-white of the citadel; the towering dark forms of the mountains stooped over them like old sentinels.

Every time she told him that it wasn't his fault. She'd pieced together enough from the other, darker dreams to know that much for herself. And every time he'd nod and deny it inside his head.

Now the Doctor rejects the absolution again, as she knows he will. And then he asks her whose dream this is. So she tells him, wondering if he'll believe her.

*

Stunned, he stands there, mouth agape, drinking in the sight of the impossible woman before him. "You're real? You’re,” he stops, starts again in that almost staccato way he has when he’s figuring things out, or I just plain floored. “No, no, no, no, no. You can’t, you can’t be. That’s…” he trails off.

She rolls her eyes at him, the smile barely suppressed at his repeated denials. “Impossible, I know.” She looks back up at the silvered leaves, edged in gold. “You keep using that word.”

He doesn’t appreciate the reference right now, still in shock. The light grows on the edge of the sky, turning it blood gold again and bathing her features in a slow spread. “You’re here,” he breathes out in awe, reaching for her hand.

She smiles back at him, takes the offered hand, interlacing their fingers, just like the old days, when they would run. “Not yet.” She looks up to the impossible sky as the light grows around them, beautiful and terrible and threatening to engulf them completely. “Soon,” she whispers.

As the world ends he believes her.


End file.
